New quotes from Richard Muller: (On "An Inconvenient Truth") "essentially 90% of what he presented was exaggerated or distorted or just false"; also "One-third of the cities in the U.S. have cooled in the last 100 years"

Climate Skeptic, Koch-Funded Scientist Richard Muller Admits Global Warming Real & Humans The Cause

RICHARD MULLER [2009]: One, you have to recognize how bad it is. The surprising answer is that, so far it hasn’t been very bad. We’ve had about one degree Fahrenheit of global warming so far. None whatsoever in the last 10 years. You need to know that, because otherwise, you will misunderstand when people criticize global warming and say it’s not real, the reason they’re saying it’s not real is there hasn’t been any in 10 years. But, we don’t expect it to happen every year. It’s gradual thing that builds up.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Richard Muller, that was you speaking in 2009. Is this still your opinion?

RICHARD MULLER: Oh, yes. In fact my former book, "Physics for Future Presidents" goes through Vice-President Al Gore’s movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" and I think it correctly shows that essentially 90% of what he presented was exaggerated or distorted or just false. But, I think part of the problem is that when we attribute every change in the weather to climate change, we engender a lot of skepticism, and that, I think, in the and that has done some harm. I think science has hurt itself by exaggerating the case. Global warming, so far, has not been very much. In the last 50 years it’s been two-thirds of a degree Celsius, while one degree Fahrenheit, and that hasn’t been much. One-third of the cities in the U.S. have cooled in the last 100 years. Astonishing statistic, but not surprising when you realize local variations are much larger than this one degree change. The danger isn’t that we have done harm, the danger is that we understand that this will continue to go up, that in the future, what is now two-thirds of the degree will become one, two, three degrees. And that will be warmer than Homo sapiens have ever experienced.
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AMY GOODMAN:...Your response to Michael Mann and to your Koch-funded research and what this means for them?

RICHARD MULLER: Well, The Koch Foundation provided about one quarter or maybe it was one-sixth of our funding and they made it clear to us that the reason they funded us was that we did recognize that these issues were real, issues that Michael Mann did not accept as real. But, I think he was wrong. I think there were valid questions and we addressed them, and they’ve expressed nothing but delight that we have been able to reach a conclusion. So, I think this cartoon-like characterization of the Koch Foundation as being right-wing deniers, I found that to be completely wrong.

Michael Mann on the other hand has published a lot of things that I disagree with. He has claimed that there was no Medieval warm period, that it’s been the warmest now that it has been 1000 years, and I was part of that National Academy study that basically demonstrated that his conclusions were wrong. So, no, he and I don’t agree on lots of things, but I think now, the key thing in science is that small realm of knowledge on which there can be universal agreement...